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Amazon Shorts. "Amazon has taken a stance of thinking how people consume content," says Deutsch Bank analyst Jeetil Patel, explaining why the online giant is now publishing short stories by famous authors for 49 cents per download, report Mylene Mangalindan and Jeffrey Trachtenberg in The Wall Street Journal. Amazon's new publishing venture, called Amazon Shorts, features 59 authors, including Danielle Steel and Terry Brooks, whose "submissions range in length from about 2,000 to 10,000 words," or "about seven pages each. Customers who purchase a piece can read it on the web, download and print a copy, save it in a digital locker or send the story to an email address."
Whether people will bother is, of course, the question. Doubters include David Steinberger, ceo of Perseus Books, who notes "that short stories traditionally have limited sales appeal." Noting that short stories, even by famous writers, usually don't sell very well, he comments: "Consumers have demonstrated that they want book-length fiction." Meanwhile, over at Little, Brown, publisher Michael Pietsch says Amazon Shorts is "interesting" and concedes that it could ultimately motivate consumers to buy full-length books they otherwise might not have. But he says Little, Brown "doesn't sell stories on an individual basis" and suggests that the Amazon idea is really "about the low cost of entry, which is one of the beauties of the web."
Question for a Monday morning: What business are you in? It's a particularly pointed question in the publishing world, where "the lines between retailers and publishers have been blurring in recent years, as publishers began to sell their own titles on the web, while retailers such as Barnes & Noble Inc. invested more heavily in publishing their own books." Amazon actually "has been adding forms of digital content -- books, music and movies -- to its website over the past year, with particular emphasis on original material. Last December, it offered short films that promoted products sold on the Amazon site," for example. But where that initiative was ostensibly free to consumers, Amazon Shorts is not. And the company, "in talks with several music-label executives over the last several weeks," may soon add "a digital music service." Hm. Forty-nine cents.
Steal This Book. "The big publishing houses just don't get it," says Warren Adler, author of "The War of the Roses," explaining why he's emailing chapters of his latest book "to anyone who asks," for free, as reported by Claudia H. Deutsch in The New York Times (8/21/05). "Print publishing has had a great, 500-year run," says Warren, "but the print book is morphing into the screen book." Warren believes that "portable electronic readers will soon do to paper books what the Walkman and the iPod did to boomboxes." And if you don't agree, well, you know you "can always just print the chapter out." Says Warren: "The main thing is, give readers a new book for free, and they might go back and buy some of the former books."
Warren has a total of 27 of them. And next month, "he will begin selling all his past novels on flash memory cards, readable on e-book players" on his website, warrenadler.com. Whether Warren's new view of publishing will work for authors who didn't write "The War of the Roses" is a good question, though. Yes, it's true that the web "with its limitless capacity for blogs and whole books that can be electronically whisked from place to place, means people can pretty well publish what they want." But the downside is that "the competition for readers, already intense, will become maddingly so." But the best news, he says, is that it's no longer necessary for writers to "make it past the gatekeepers at publishing houses to be published," the way he did to get his first novel, "Options," published in 1973, when he was 45.
Warren says the only reason he got that book deal was that he agreed to publicize another of the publisher's novels for free. These days, he notes, outfits like iUniverse.com will not only publish your book and give it distribution via Amazon, et. al., but also help with editing and even deciding which genre is best for your work. If you do end up with a traditional book deal, Warren's advice is to "negotiate like an entrepreneur." For example, get "the right to record your own books ... And don't automatically give the publisher options on a second book," because, he says, "if that first book does well, you can negotiate a better contract on the second." Finally, says Warren, remember that rejection by publishers does not mean you're a failure: "In the end," he says, "as in all things, luck trumps talent."
Tim Manners, editor
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